Hello and thank you for OpenProject!

We are at the beginning of a large programme that consists of more than 100 single projects conducted by different groups of people. My organisation just recently adopted OpenProject Enterprise Edition for this task.

However, as most project teams are not "properly trained" with typical methods of project management, the vast majority of projects will be conducted outside of OpenProject with the project leaders planning their tasks on project contract forms and regularly reporting their progress to the programme management. Only a small fractions of the projects will use OpenProject.

What makes things even more difficult is the fact, that currently we don't know which projects will use OpenProjects and there shall be the option to "opt-in" later.

In this situation: what's the best practice to setup the programme portfolio in OpenProject.

I can see two options, both with certain advantages and disadvantages:

1. We can create the programme structure (different streams of the programme) as a parent project in OpenProjects and create a sub project for each of the single projects. I think this will be very time consuming and will not necessarily bring a lot of gain as most project teams will never use OpenProject as a tool.

2. We can create the whole programme (with all sub projects) as a project in OpenProject using customized work package types. This would be easier to setup but possibly make it difficult for project teams to later opt-in to OpenProject.

What would you think is the best solution? In case we go with option 2, how would a project team later opt-in to OpenProject?

Also: how can we make use of the project portfolio features (especially those offered by the Enterprise Edition) in either solution?